Hard surface sculpting using the HPolish and other brushes in ZBrush

so I thought I'd do a video tutorial on the hard surface pushes that I used to create this character here which is a samurai chi it's textured and substance painter but totally sculpted in ZBrush the mask itself was done using these polish brushes but some of the other details such as the helmet is done using zmodeler brush so I'm just going to cover the creation of the mask for this so as you can see here it is here this is the final result but where we actually started off I just turn off the teeth and eyes we actually started off from the this is this point here which is really rough and ready hopefully you'll agree it's a fairly simple model that anybody can make and isn't there's not much not much to it it's basically just a bit of a mess so from here if you do end up making something like this I wanted to show you that you can get to this result really really quickly using these brushes so the ones that we're going to use today are the H polish primarily the move brush the claybuildup and the damn standard and possibly the pinch so for each of these you need to load them into your interface at least once in order to be able to assign hotkeys to them so for example if you press B H to filter down to two brushes argument H and then P you load the H polish brush once you've done that once it will now appear inside your brush menu so if you go to your preferences and turn on enable customize you can now go back to your brush menu and using ctrl + alt drag that H polish brush onto your interface somewhere I've already done it down here so once you've done that with those brushes load each of them in turn so be st4 dam standard BCB 4 claybuildup brush BM W for the move brush right BM v rather for the move brush and trim dynamic let's do that one as well so BT D and H polish PHP once you've loaded them put them all on to your interface turn off enable customized hands talk and fake now we can start assigning shortcut keys to them by holding down ctrl + alt and then clicking on them once and you'll see that a message will appear up here the left-hand corner asking you now to define a short cookie for that so once you've done that to flair you next thing you do before you even move the mouse or your pointer you'll see if I move it that will go away so very next thing you do is you hit alt d' for that one and run through them all right put alt H mmm alt T alt W for move I'll see for claybuildup and alt P for pinch and alt d' for damn standard so to start off we'll start off with the H polish that's alt H and from here grab a large brush and just start polishing and you'll see that it'll immediately just start creating this kind of nice flat surface which is kind of cool so we can kind of define some some of our main forms here are our main areas that we know we're gonna want very flat our main Plains so I'm just gonna click on these in turn and polish them and see if you start off in the middle here you're gonna get a flat plane and for what we're actually looking for on this is for this to have a little bit of a point where it meets so I'm just going to put this up on the interface press shift s to drop a copy onto the interface which will swap back to the guy that we're working on and we have that now as reference so as I said if you start off in the middle here it's going to flatten that plane here's an H polish brush from there and work its way out that's not what we want to do we want to come in at an angle so we get this this noise sharp line here so we start off somewhere like this as we get closer it's gonna naturally create an angle and the H polish brush respects angles and tries to keep them where possible so once we've done that then we'll get this shape and we can polish the top down a little bit if you're shy a little bit you're not getting enough of this stuff up here you can just change to a claybuildup brush add some extra polish all right some extra volume on there and then go back to your H polish brush and because you've started on this plane here as you go close to this it will kind of polish it to that and the same for down here so they'll give you that sharper detail in that area so the H polish brush works with the alt button held down as well which will give you at the option to take concave place concave meshes and make them convex this is a really important part of this functionality here so we're gonna need to use that a fair bit I'm going to just demonstrate that down here for example so if I for his lips and we want this flat area underneath so I'm going to all this let's cut that down I just polished polished polished which polish and come around the corner here push that as well now when we want to follow it to polish this bit down here I can polish this down and as it comes up to the edge here you'll see that it respects that edge and maintains that it sharpens that edge in fact and as I come up to this other one you'll see that sometimes it'll actually start interfering with this other edge up here and so as I come up to this you'll see I'm trying to flatten this but it's now bending this down inside it so this is where we're going to use the inverse functionality where we hold down alt and it will pull up towards an edge so if I'm on this surface and I hold down alt it's now pulling that up so because it's pulling it up and I can then push it back down again I can pull this surface up we're now getting a tighter surface between these two so I can pull this up I actually had a hole in this mesh so I'm going to pull this up flatten it out again I'm going to read dynamesh this just because I'm addicted to clean that up a little bit and you'll see that now when I polish this here I can flatten I can keep that flat if I hold down Alton I'm bringing it up a little bit and so basically what I'm doing is I'm trying to take some of the convexity out of this you see this curve that we have here so I'm holding down alt here to bring this closer towards me so I have more of the surface here so some of that convexity is now gone I'm now getting a straight line and because I brought that up I can now push this other bit down and then push this back up and push this down so it's a bit of a push-pull that's what we're going for here to try and get this to ultimately give us back to the result that we want so we see we can actually get a really nice flat surface here I'm holding down alt to push this up I'm not holding down alt to push it down and that gives us this flat surface so it's the case of rinse and repeat for the rest of the model now and you'll find some areas where you think okay well I wonder I want to keep this flat I'll start polishing around here and now I want a plane that's down here but I don't have enough detail so we want to have a lip basically that's coming around here so in that case just use your damn standard and so all today and what we're going to do here is we're basically telling is that brush okay this is where we're gonna watch our detail if we hold down alt on the damn standard it will do the opposite so normal done standard will cut in alt on the damn standard will protrude out sharra flopper detail so we're basically giving it an area to say well this is where the top of our details are going to be so now that we've defined that if we hold down alt H again to go back to our polish if we polish this area it's going to to straighten it out and which is cool but if we hold down alt we can actually get it to pull up towards that line and then polish it back down again and we're gonna kind of get an even clean a result again so you can see as I polish over here if this is concave in here I'll hold down alt I'll bring it up because it tries to respect edges it won't destroy too much of the outside and I can do the same on the other side here and if I'm not getting enough surface detail I can do exactly what I did on the nose add in some extra volume here in order to be able to polish that down use my damn standard to say actually that's where I'm exaggerating this giving it too much but it's basically letting it know that's what the edge that I want to respect so when you're holding out alt or not holding down alt it will always look at that edge and say okay are you appreciate that's that's what you're trying to keep and so as you see as I go through this holding down alt or not all Donald it's basically sharpening up those edges for me again if we have too much detail down here this is too high I can either choose to you know use a claybuildup brush and knock it down or I can just choose the H polish brush find an angle that makes sense here and this instance what I'm doing is I'm working on on this area here this is the area that I want to keep flat I don't really care about this because I know I can get that back so even though my brush might be affecting that you want to make this stroke we get all this this kind of stuff down here I'm gonna allow that to happen because my focus is on the plane that I'm sculpting on first that's the bit that I want to get flat once I have that I know I can bring this stuff back by just holding down alt and letting it build up and it's going to respect that edge so in that way I'm building back up towards an edge right trihard so rinse and repeat for the rest of the model just go through your model and actually build up the planes wherever you want them building up and wherever you don't have enough enough detail and knocking them down where you do or using a damn standard so for example if we look at this area up here where we have quite a lot of detail here we could use a damn standard brush for this where we're basically doing something like this something like that we not will carve in below so I'm just mixture between alt and not only Arnold once we have that that's enough detail for our aged polish brush to know polish everything down to that level and you see we're getting that nice shape there when you want to bring the bottom up you can hold down alt because that's concave we'll bring that up to where that surface is if it goes too far doesn't matter we can hold down also bring this off and now it's the push-pull of bringing stuff up or down depending on where you want it so for example here I'd like to fill this in I'm holding down alt to bring this up I'm gonna go of alt because I want to sharpen this I'd like to bring this up this is too round for me I could use a move brush to just kind of nudge it back and then just polish that or if I just have the Polish brush active anyway I can just let this polish back not worrying what's happening here we're more looking at what's happening on on the plane I'm actually sculpting on knowing that when I start polishing pushing this up its going to start correcting that for me automatically and that way we get those details so hope these tips help and as usual feel free to subscribe if you find that they do

Channel: Sean Forsyth

Views: 5,689

Keywords: zbrush, zbrush tutorial, hard surface sculpting, hard surfaces, hpolish brush, hpolish tips, sculpting tips, hard surface tips, hard surfaces zbrush, zbrush hard surface, hpolish brush, hard surface zbrush, hard surface modeling zbrush, hard surface sculpting zbrush, zbrush hard surface sculpting for all levels, zbrush hard surface techniques, zbrush sculpting, how to start hardsurface sculpting, zbrush 2020, zbrush tutorial hard surface, zbrush hard surface brushes, 3d

Id: xuTiQphuP9A

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020